Charles Gardner Sullivan (1884-1965) was a prolific screenwriter with around 200 credits, the great majority of which were from the silent era. He was noted for the unusual amount of directorial detail included in his screenplays. Producer Jesse Lasky, speaking of Sullivan’s collaboration with Cecil B DeMille on films like The Buccaneer (1938) and Union Pacific (1939), described him as “the methodical giant who composed sequences of short shots and elaborately prepared camera angles that were calculated to give DeMille pictures a tremendous sense of visual place”.
It was while working as a journalist that Sullivan began contributing story ideas to film studios. The first accepted would seem to have been Her Polished Family (1912), though this is not included by IMDb.
When Lee Surrenders (1912) was filmed by Thomas Ince, beginning a long collaboration between Sullivan and the producer/director. In 1914, the writer relocated to Hollywood and joined Ince’s permanent staff. He worked on some of Ince’s most successful pictures, and co-wrote Civilization (1916), the big-budget anti-war film. It was a subject he would return to fourteen years later, when he supervised the screenplay for All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).
By 1920, Sullivan was the highest-paid writer in Hollywood and, for a time, ran his own production company.
Sullivan made one contribution to MGM’s musicals, co-writing, with Bess Meredyth, the screenplay for The Cuban Love Song.
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